Vote Now: Awesome Proposals for the Spring OpenStack Summit

Mirantis (and our friends at Cloudscaling) has submitted a variety of great session abstracts, from my discussion on updating the OpenStack Mission Statement to disrupt large player competitive barriers and keep the stack open for innovation to Randy Bias’ walkthrough of hybrid cloud landmines to avoid when architecting applications.

Below, we’ve summarized each talk and provided a link to its page on the voting site. As always, you must be a member of the OpenStack Foundation to vote. If you’re not already a member, just click here to join as an individual member for free. You get to shape the OpenStack Summit agenda by voting up the sessions that you’d like to see.

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Mirantis Session Proposals

Here’s a list of some of our proposed sessions. (The complete list is at the bottom of this post.)

(Vote Here) Configuring Live Migrations for Workload Transitions (Damian Igbe) – This talk will review approaches to three fundamentally different live migration methodologies: block migration, shared storage migration, and migrating instances booted from Cinder volumes (i.e., volume booted migration). It will compare these three approaches and discuss factors to consider when deciding which methodology to use in different scenarios. We will also review practical (and sometimes critical) steps to ensure that both the cloud and its workloads are properly configured for live migration, along with important factors that can make or break smooth implementation and operation of live migration.

(Vote Here) Step One, Launch Openstack; Step Zero, Pick your hardware (Gregory Elkinbard) – The power of OpenStack software implementation, deployment and operations all cross the critical path of hardware selection. In this presentation, we’ll present a distillation of the key factors we have applied at Mirantis through dozens of highly successful OpenStack deployments on how to select an optimal hardware platform for your OpenStack cloud.

(Vote Here) Source Based Packaging: The Missing Ingredient of Continuous Delivery? (Dmitry Borodaenko) – This talk will explore the gap between source-based CI used by the OpenStack community and package-oriented deployment favored by OpenStack distributions, and examine the state of tools aiming to bridge that gap. Attend and you’ll learn how to tick the OpenStack CI/CD checkbox without leaving the comfort of the package-config-service pattern and the safety of security updates from your favorite distro.

(Vote Here) Is it time to update the OpenStack mission statement? (Boris Renski) – This talk will take a closer look at various OpenStack community initiatives and projects that disrupt competitive barriers established by large infrastructure players. I’ll also examine how the OpenStack community is making OpenStack distribution vendors in their present form irrelevant in many respects.

(Vote Here) Preparing and Publishing an Application in the Openstack Application Catalog (Alexander Tivelkov) – This workshop will walk you through the steps required to prepare an application for publication. The presenters will pick a real-life application and demonstrate how to publish it in the Catalog. Attendees will see how to define the configuration parameters and dependencies, build the deployment and maintenance workflows, construct a user-friendly UI to control these workflows – and, eventually, how to publish all of it in the Catalog. And all of this without writing a single line of Python code or modifying a single bit of the application itself.

(Vote Here) How to Avoid Picking Problems that Openstack Can’t Solve (Evgeniya Shumakher) – To be effective promoters and developers of OpenStack, we need to be able to identify these cases (not all edge-cases, either) and have the firmness of conviction to guide prospective users away from OpenStack, when risks are so high that their results will be marginal or unsatisfactory. (And we need to look at these gaps, where they exist, and think hard about filling them.) Attendees will leave this presentation with a fuller understanding of how to pilot their organizations away from what may become lackluster OpenStack engagements, and towards opportunities that take best advantage of OpenStack as it now exists.

(Vote Here) Extending the Fuel Project to Accelerate and Simplify Deployment of OpenStack Drivers and Components (David Easter) – In this session, we’ll fully familiarize attendees with the (relatively simple) process of becoming an OpenStack contributor. We’ll go over the process roadmap, account registration, security and authentication, connecting with community online resources and documentation, OpenStack and related code repositories, projects and their taxonomies, configuring Git to work within OpenStack’s code-review process and committing changes, review and approvals. And we’ll also cover details of how and where to best patch Fuel and describe the Fuel API timetable, imminent component releases and Fuel’s project roadmap. Attendees – particularly developers – should come away from this session ready to join the OpenStack project, find resources, pick goals and quickly be productive, especially where contributing to Fuel is concerned.

(Vote Here) Rally – Benchmarking OpenStack at Scale Using Your Own Hardware (Boris Pavlovic) – Benchmarking a huge distributed system like OpenStack raises the complexity bar significantly. Add to that the fact that OpenStack may be a moving target – with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) keeping things in flux – and benchmarking becomes, as Spock might say, “a non-trivial problem.” This session will explore Rally’s high level architecture, the current state of the Rally project, and the Rally Roadmap. We’ll also cover how to use Rally to improve the quality of OpenStack (Dev case), to ensure that OpenStack clouds pass SLA (QA/DevOps case) and to help build CI/CD. Attendees should leave this session with a solid understanding of Rally and most of the info they need to begin integrating Rally to existing OpenStacks and architecting it into new deployments.

(Vote Here) How Community can make OpenStack Customer Centric (Alex Freedland) – As a major OpenStack vendor, Mirantis has developed a set of best practices for welcoming and working with end-user customers, extending to them the benefits of OpenStack community participation, and conversely, obtaining from them guidance and actionable market intelligence. By discussing these best-practices, we hope to 1) help the OpenStack community reach out more consistently, and with better results, to real end-user customers 2) develop beneficial (but also non-burdensome) roles in the community, enabling and shaping participation by a range of parties whose main motive is to use rather than build the product and 3) explore structural tweaks that will enable better exchange of information between ‘style: end-user’ participants and members of the community who participate in more fundamental ways.

(Vote Here) Bare Metal Peer-to-Peer Provisioning at Scale (Herman Narkaytis) – In this talk, we’ll review the current state of bare metal provisioning in TripleO / Ironic and Fuel and model the scalability limits of alternate approaches and architectures. We will discuss the state of things in Icehouse, including what use cases are covered, the algorithm, and limitations. We will also explore whether plans for Juno can reverse diminishing scalability and drive bare metal provisioning closer to linear performance. Bare metal provisioning (versus creating virtual machines) has its own challenges, and after attending this talk, you’ll not only have a better understanding of the differences, you’ll also have a feel for possible ways to mitigate those challenges.

(Vote Here) Breaking the East-West Barrier: How to Combine a Flat Network, Security, Manageability and Killer Performance in Openstack (Pedro Marques, Przemyslaw Grygiel) – In this talk, we’ll outline a practical, step-by-step method for configuring and provisioning a 200-node OpenStack cluster using Fuel. Using a fully-functional physical infrastructure, we broke through very real bottlenecks in Openstack defaults and in tooling (the proof of a real bottleneck is that when you resolve it, it exposes the next bottleneck). In addition, we will enumerate typical mistakes and pitfalls.

(Vote Here) Securing OpenStack with Intel Trusted Computing (Christian Huebner) – Intel Trusted Computing allows comparing the current state of a compute host with a previously stored good state. This presentation will contain a general overview of Trusted Computing, OpenAttestation server and client deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the inner workings of trusted_filter.py and its attestation procedure against an OpenAttestation server and configuration and testing of OpenStack controllers and compute nodes for trusted execution. The presentation is based on a recent deployment of OpenAttestation with both trusted and untrusted compute nodes using RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and OpenAttestation 1.6.

Cloudscaling Session Proposals

(Vote Here) Open Cloud System 3.0: OpenStack Architected Like AWS (Azmir Mohamed) – At Cloudscaling, we spend a great deal of effort operationalizing OpenStack for customers and ensuring it’s compatible with leading public clouds. In this session, we’ll detail the configuration and design decisions we make in real world OpenStack deployments.

(Vote Here) OpenStack Scale-out High Availability: Scaling to 1,000+ servers without Neutron (JC Smith + Randy Bias) – The default OpenStack networking models don’t make sense in a modern datacenter. Similar to the approach taken by HP, CERN and other deployments, we’ll detail how we replace the default model to deploy a fully scale-out networking model that can support 100s of racks with incredibly high performance.

(Vote Here) For Cloud Operators: Hands-on With OpenStack for Elastic Clouds (Sean Winn) – In this session, we will provide a condensed version of our 2-day OpenStack Bootcamp workshop with an operator-centric, hands-on approach.

(Vote Here) ZFS on Linux + OpenStack: Flash Performance at Spinning Disk Prices (Joseph Glanville) – Join us for this walkthrough of ZFS on Linux (ZoL) where we’ll cover the state of ZoL along with the OpenStack plugins and drivers. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of why multi-tenant cloud workloads are perfect for ZFS as well as how to measure and tune performance.

(Vote Here) Voice of the User: Running OpenStack in Production (Drew Smith + Ryan Lane) – Join us for an analysis and interactive discussion of real world OpenStack deployment issues. Along with a guest speaker who is running an OpenStack based cloud, we’re going to combine a review of data from our field and support requests with war story examples of “when it goes wrong”.

(Vote Here) OpenStack Block Storage: Performance vs. Reliability (Randy Bias + Joseph Glanville) – In this presentation, we’ll talk about selecting and designing the right kind of storage for your use case (where there are tradeoffs between performance and reliability). We’ll also walk you through how we built our block storage solution in Open Cloud System, its design principles, and explain why it’s a better version of AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) in several key ways.

(Vote Here) iSCSI Performance Testing & Tuning (Joseph Glanville) – In this session, we’ll explore the pros and cons of different iSCSI implementations within OpenStack Cinder deployments. We’ll then look at performance tuning options for iSCSI as well as the effects of related architecture components such as using jumbo frames in the network, flash storage, hybrid storage pools and iSCSI multi-pathing.

(Vote Here) Emulating A Large Scale, Multi-Rack Cloud on One Server (Mike Lang) – In this presentation we’ll introduce a new open source tool that allows us to emulate a multi-rack, multi-server, OpenStack deployment on a single server, allowing complete cloud architectures to be tested. We’ll also recommend how this tool can be used to expand the OpenStack continuous integration system and possibly serve as a mechanism for testing a variety of OpenStack reference architectures within complex, multi-rack deployments.

(Vote Here) Hybrid Cloud Landmines: Architecting Apps to Avoid Problems (Drew Smith + Randy Bias) – Application portability? Cross-cloud replication and bursting? These are hard issues with serious implications that we’ll examine in detail, digging into the subtleties between simply implementing a cross-cloud API and actually using it to get real work done. We’ll provide a set of recommendations on how to architect your application from the ground up to be hybrid cloud friendly.

(Vote Here) Tinker: A Tool for Network Configuration Management at Cloud Scale (Abhishek Chanda) – Managing network configuration in a cloud deployment can be a major pain. In this session, we will introduce tinker, a tool to generate and manage network device configuration using existing metadata to automatically and reliably generate configurations for all network devices in a cloud.

(Vote Here) OpenStack and the Google Compute Engine APIs (Alex Levine + Randy Bias) – It’s a hybrid cloud world and OpenStack powered public clouds won’t be everywhere, so it makes sense that we have a rich ecosystem of compatibility APIs in addition to the native OpenStack APIs. Come learn about the Google Compute Engine (GCE) APIs we recently built and submitted back to StackForge, including how they were built, how to add them to your own OpenStack deployment, and how to test them.